Very new here!, and just wondering if there should be an archive.org book thread as a friend for edonelly's excellent Google Books thread. There's been a huge influx of new titles this year, so coverage is now comparable (at least) to that on googlebooks, and in quality the scans are generally far superior. As an example, here is a list of Loebs that I've tracked down. (A nice touch: the original text always faces its translation in these, whereas this seems to go wrong more often than not in the googlebook Loebs). Many of these titles were added in the last weeks and months, so the list is probably still actively growing.

This is just the tip of an above-average iceberg. I can see a lot of rare titles that go way beyond limits of my tiny intellect, so please feel free to add your finds here if you like.

Two tips: 1. If you don't have a very fast internet connection you should use the "turn thumbnails off" option (you'll soon see why!). 2. The DjVu files are smaller than the pdfs, seem virtually identical in quality, and are distinctly quicker to browse through, at least on my computer. To download the DjVu file you need to click the FTP option, and save the file. View with WinDjVu or Mac DjVu http://windjview.sourceforge.net/)

Wow! Thank you Briggsy! I've been looking through the Internet Archive, and I've found some stuff, but the sheer volume is intimidating! This is a big help.

I agree the DjVu format is the way to go; the quality of the image really is better and it can be about a third the size of the PDF file. And if your computer's not the latest and fastest, the DjVu reader is lean and mean compared with Adobe's bloated monster.

If you have Firefox, there's an extension called DownThemAll that allows you to circumvent that whole FTP process: You hit the FTP link, it gives you the list of file types, you click on the .djvu file, and it handles it just like a regular download. This is the only thing I use Firefox for any more, but it's worth the price (which is nothing, after all.) Plus, DownThemAll somehow ignores the kill signals Google Books sends out to abort the download early.

I think we should start a thread (well, I guess you just did) for all our Internet Archive finds.

These are excellent. I've been finding that I actually prefer the Archive's interface and scans to that of Google's most of the time (Google is clearly more interested in quantity rather than quality), so I'm very glad to see the Archive's collection growing (on my website I just intermix the two). Here are some Google Books Loebs (and some OCT's just for fun), for you Loeb-lovers:

I'm curious about the copyright on Loeb's, because some of these are much newer than anything on Google Books. The classic presumption is that anything "pre-1923" is public domain, but some of these books are MUCH more recent than that (obviously the original texts are ancient, but the translations as well as the production of it all would seem to be worth protecting). Some of these scans are books printed in the 50's. I just saw one with Editorial comments dated 1991 ( http://www.archive.org/details/scriptoreshistor01camb )! Does the LCL not care about copyright at all?

As far as I can see these titles mostly include Loebs PUBLISHED in 1923 or earlier, although I did notice one published as late as 1932. Many are scanned from more recent reprints however. The example you mention was published in 1921 and the scanned reprint contains only a single page of later editorial comment. The archive.org entry states under "evidence of copyright" "no visible notice of copyright", which surprised me too, but it appears to be true.

Tracking all these Loebs was making my brain hurt, so I put together a list of all the loebs sorted by catalog number and then added links for those we have Google or Archive links for. Once we get a wiki going, I'll move it there. For now:

If you click on the catalog number it will take you to the Loebs website's description of that title, which I think is kind of cool (though they have shuffled some things around over the past 90ish years). There are 501 loebs out there, so far we can get over 100 of them through either Google or the Internet Archive. I think that's pretty cool, too.

I have to congratulate you with this marvellous, great work. I think I speak in everybody's name here, when I say this is really a great help for e-booksearchers. Are you by the way also interested in other sites that offer classical e-books? Let me know.

Thereâ€™s also DjVu stuff out there for folks on the lower rungs of Latin learning.

Dâ€™Oogeâ€™s â€™Latin for Beginnersâ€™ can be viewed but not downloaded (with or without a proxy) at Google Books but by clicking below â€™ References from web pagesâ€™ on â€™Image: Latin for beginners.pdf â€“Wikimedia Commonsâ€™, I warped into a page where I could download a DjVu version.

This was a perfect copy of the book - far superior to Googleâ€™s pdf or archive.orgâ€™s txt and html files, all of which perpetrated identical errors (whoâ€™s copying who?) like â€™bellum genitâ€™ for â€™bellum geritâ€™, â€™pericuisâ€™ for â€™periculisâ€™, â€™plaribusâ€™ for â€™pluribusâ€™, etc. The DjVu comes complete with macrons too, for those interested.

Iâ€™m still new to this file format. Is there a â€™DjVu for Beginnersâ€™? Who invented it and what tools exist for turning it into editable text?

This should be a fairly accurate version. It came from our leader Jeff's scans, which were then put through OCR and multiple runs of page-by-page corrections by the Distributed Proofreaders. If things are being copied out there, I'm sure it's everyone copying this version.

Interaxus wrote:Iâ€™m still new to this file format. Is there a â€™DjVu for Beginnersâ€™? Who invented it and what tools exist for turning it into editable text?

Just to show there still are a few pockets of the software industry existing here in the shadow of Microsoft, the DjVu format was developed by: http://lizardtech.com/ right here in Seattle. A little payback to Adobe for buying out and then killing Aldus all those years ago!

Interaxus wrote: Strange that â€™our leaderâ€™, Jeff - ... - allows such a defective product to infect the world at the speed of cyberlight. Not exactly the hallmark of quality ...

Well, Jeff just scanned the original text into a pdf and turned it over, as a public domain document, for conversion to real text to Distributed Proofreaders (which has done this for over 11,000 texts now available at Project Gutenberg). If there are inaccuracies in the OCR/proofing, then it is that organization which is to blame, for once they got ahold of it, Jeff no longer played a role.

Latin does a little better, since the letters can be recognized, but generally these OCR programs rely heavily on a spell checker to catch errors, and there's not much there to handle latin, and macrons seem to cause lots of problems. For example, here's the "text" from Anthon's Latin Versification:

Archive Text Version wrote:LATIN VERSIFICATION. PART I.

* (31.) Ginger tempora vlctrlcia Apollmea lauro.

(32.) Felix qui transegit aevum in patriis agrls.

Quam juvat cubantem audlre Immites ventos !

(34.) Phseacia tenet me aegrum terns Igndtis.

and the original scan:

So it does OK, but it makes a couple of errors per line, which is a far cry from what you get when its gone through the human editing process (which apparently is not perfect).

Unfortunately, this is the best we have right now for about 99+% of the books out there (but it is better than nothing, especially if you are searching for something and do get a valid hit).

So I thought I'd update people on what's available Loeb-wise for download. I've continued to keep up my list, and people occasionally email me with additions. A very large number of the older Loebs can now be downloaded from google and/or the archive. In fact, of the first 140 Loebs (the "pre-1923" ones, if you will) all but five can be downloaded. Of the full 500+ Loebs in existence, almost exactly half are available right now for download. I still don't fully understand the copyright issues, but the Loebs do appear to be fairly unique in that even some of the fairly recent editions make no claim of copyright in them, and both Google and the internet archive uploaders attest that the versions available for download are in the public domain.

If anyone is in a "hunting" sort of mood, the five missing early Loebs are: